Why are women with brain tumours being dismissed as attention-seekers?

[L'engle]

I think normal attention seeking tends to involve things like buying a loud car or motorcycle and going joyriding where there is a watching audience. I mean that would be way cooler than faking an illness, which I think is quite low on the list of things anyone would want to do or be seen doing.

 

[PatJ]

I think normal attention seeking tends to involve things like buying a loud car or motorcycle and going joyriding where there is a watching audience. I mean that would be way cooler than faking an illness, which I think is quite low on the list of things anyone would want to do or be seen doing.

I assume the attention seeking label is because some doctors think a patient is seeking attention through sympathy and a desire to be cared for. A loud vehicle wouldn't get sympathy the way an illness would.

 

[adreno]

some doctors think a patient is seeking attention through sympathy and a desire to be cared for.

Right. Because most doctors are so sympathetic and caring.

 

[biophile]

Some evidence to support my view that even humour websites can be more reasonable than psychobabble articles:

http://www.cracked.com/article_23304_6-weird-ways-sexism-screwing-up-healthcare.html

#4. Women Are More Likely To Be Told That Their Pain Is All In Their Heads

For 4,000 years, diagnosing women was the easiest job in the world. No matter what was wrong them -- be it depression, seizures, or gunshot wounds -- it was all chalked up to "hysteria." It was a catch-all mental disorder that basically meant that all of a woman's health issues were a product of her own daffy imagination.

Of course, the medical world has changed drastically since then. Modern doctors use hysteria to explain way more female ailments that their old-timey counterparts could've ever even dreamed of. The only difference is that modern doctors have retired the word "hysteria" in favor of new phrases like "stress" or "psychosomatic symptoms," which have a vastly different number of syllables, but serve the same purpose of dismissing patients with legitimate health problems. These include but not limited to: Polycystic ovary syndrome (a serious hormonal disorder), Lupus (an autoimmune disease), and Fibromyalgia (a rheumatic condition that almost exclusively affects women who tend to be told that their chronic pain is all in their heads).

It's estimated that tens of millions of women in the U.S. are dealing with unnecessary pain because doctors assume that, even if there is something wrong with them, they're probably exaggerating their symptoms. Simply put, medicine doesn't trust women to be familiar with their own bodies.

As a result, legitimately sick people often tend to hide their health problems from their doctors out of fear of being accused of making shit up, even when they might be having a heart attack. Not that telling the doctor would have made a difference -- research found that 75 percent of doctors fail to properly diagnose female patients with cardiovascular diseases if they are also suffering from stress, because the stress gets blamed for all of their symptoms. It's not like a woman could be suffering from both stress and cardiovascular problems. The strain would crush them before they even made it out to the doctor's office.

 

[chipmunk1]

Cracked.com vs. The Lancet.

http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)61530-6/fulltext

People become patients when they bring medically unexplained symptoms to the doctor. Most are sufficiently comforted by the bleached rituals of the medical encounter to return home as they came in: essentially well. But sometimes the worried well become the worried sick. They still feel like patients when they get back home and so they return to the clinic again and again with chronic symptoms that do not respond well to any treatment. Efforts to reassure them fall flat because what they really seek is validation. It is almost as if an invisible director cast them as a patient but neglected to provide the script, and so over time they rehearse the clinical history in search of an agreeable “medical” diagnosis. Questions about psychosocial factors seem to glance off some internal shell, and their answers alight instead on some other complaint. They might withhold some details of their condition because they don't want the doctor to get the “wrong idea”. They ask for more tests—each one increasing the risk of misleading or false-positive results. They feel too diminished for their old activities and now spend their time reading about their symptoms online, comparing their narratives to those of other people with similar complaints. Seasons and holidays are eclipsed by phases of illness and milestones of the medical workup. Their relationships suffer. The external boundaries of their former selves recede and the externalisation of these symptoms pushes outwards to fill that void. They say, “This isn't me, I'm not usually like this!” But now they are.

In fact, Susan Sontag notes that health and disease could both be considered parts of nature, yet we use disease metaphors when we want to say that something is unnatural. She and I part ways at her thesis, however: “Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.” Setting the “will power” bit aside, and recognising that she was writing at a time when some people still talked about “cancer personalities”, I think she over-reaches. Illnesses believed to have a psychological aetiology seem inherently more metaphorical, but why wouldn't that be the case? The mind itself is one of our most compelling metaphors. And it is easy to forget that the linguistic maps which guide us through the physical terrains of disease are also, at a fundamental level, essentially metaphorical in nature. Is there any other way to explain how or why, elementally, an organism grows or decays?

The question is : Who is the talented writer and who is the doctor?

 

[jimells]

The question is : Who is the talented writer and who is the doctor?

One wonders why the author is in clinical medicine. Obviously they should be chained to the lab bench and kept far away from patients and student doctors. Or better yet find a different line of work - how about Chief Dog Catcher?

 

[lansbergen]

how about Chief Dog Catche

You think they know how to catch a dog?